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Diversity

Proponents of diversity operate under the assumption that multiculturalism represents the enlightened position on the topics of immigration and society, but is that really so? Here’s our Table of Contents to this page:

1. John LeoBowling With Our OwnRobert Putnam’s sobering new diversity research scares its author.25 June 2007

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.

Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.”

Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” he writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.” And the “hunkering down” occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income. Even when communities are equally poor or rich, equally safe or crime-ridden, diversity correlates with less trust of neighbors, lower confidence in local politicians and news media, less charitable giving and volunteering, fewer close friends, and less happiness.

Putnam has long been aware that his findings could have a big effect on the immigration debate. Last October, he told the Financial Times that “he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity.” He said it “would have been irresponsible to publish without that,” a quote that should raise eyebrows. Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings.

Nor has Putnam made details of his study available for examination by peers and the public. So far, he has published only an initial summary of his findings, from a speech he gave after winning an award in Sweden, in the June issue of Scandinavian Political Studies. His office said Putnam is in Britain, working on a religion project at the University of Manchester, and is currently too busy to grant an interview.

Putnam’s study does make two positive points: in the long run, increased immigration and diversity are inevitable and desirable, and successful immigrant societies “dampen the negative effects of diversity” by constructing new identities. Social psychologists have long favored the optimistic hypothesis that contact between different ethnic and racial groups increases tolerance and social solidarity. For instance, white soldiers assigned to units with black soldiers after World War II were more relaxed about desegregation of the army than were soldiers in all-white units. But Putnam acknowledges that most empirical studies do not support the “contact hypothesis.” In general, they find that the more people are brought into contact with those of another race or ethnicity, the more they stick to their own, and the less they trust others. Putnam writes: “Across local areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden Canada and Britain, greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust and, at least in some cases, lower investment in public goods.”

Though Putnam is wary of what right-wing politicians might do with his findings, the data might give pause to those on the left, and in the center as well. If he’s right, heavy immigration will inflict social deterioration for decades to come, harming immigrants as well as the native-born. Putnam is hopeful that eventually America will forge a new solidarity based on a “new, broader sense of we.” The problem is how to do that in an era of multiculturalism and disdain for assimilation.

It looks as if those of us who questioned the refugee program will go down in Washington County history as “unwelcoming.” This is a handy way for the local journalists and clergypeople to dismiss our concerns, but it is far from the truth.

It is an example of the liberal mindset that cannot conceive of any reason for not welcoming everyone in need, except for mean-spiritedness.

I know it well; I used to feel that way myself. I got a warm glow just thinking about people of different races and ethnicities mingling together.

And I’m perfectly happy now for everybody to mingle who wants to. In fact, when I moved to Washington County 15 years ago I was impressed by how many inter-racial couples I saw at events in the county, and how little notice or comment they received.

But it strikes me how much of this discussion is about making the givers feel good, and less about what good their actions do for the recipients, not to mention what the objective results are for the good of the community. It’s about their intentions, their sense of moral superiority and that is evident in the scolding we who disagree with them have received. They are the great and good; we are scum.

There are many good arguments to be made about the cost to taxpayers of bringing in refugees, costs that are far higher than the officials who were at the forum let on.

But here I want to tackle what is probably the most difficult issue to discuss in America today: Ethnic diversity. This certainly will open me up to insults and hatred, but here goes anyway.

Because of the need for liberals to feel good about their own tolerance, they are not able to differentiate between ethnic groups. Anyone who is “different” is therefore good and deserving.

But in the real world there are groups of refugees who come to America and settle in, and others whose customs and beliefs cause huge amounts of trouble. This does not say anything about the niceness, hardworkingness or picturesqueness of any individual, but it is a fact about groups.

For example, Somalis come from a primitive country which has been practically lawless for a while. Their customs include female genital mutilation and wife-beating.

There are reports of various troubles from all over America where Somalis have settled in any number. For example, in Minneapolis a man received a sentence of seventeen and a half years for beating his wife so badly that she is permanently brain damaged. From the newspaper account:

“Advocates and law enforcement authorities say domestic violence often is a taboo topic in the male-dominated Somali community. Women are strongly discouraged from reporting it, said Omar Jamal of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center.”

Another widely reported problem is that Somali taxi drivers in Minnesota have refused to pick up passengers who are carrying bottles of wine. They claim it is against their Muslim religion, although at least one Muslim religious authority has denied this. As other Muslims don’t refuse such passengers it seems to be a Somali custom, one that is causing great conflict in Minnesota.

This is a problem not of race, but of culture. For example, in the 1990s thousands of Russian mobsters arrived in the United States as refugees. They have caused a huge organized crime problem in cities including New York, Miami, and Chicago.

Then there is a recent report in The Washington Post about Albanian blood-feuds between families that the government there can’t seem to stamp out. In the last few years, thousands of Albanians have come as refugees to the United States.

Now we’re bringing thousands of Iraqi refugees into the United States. Nashville is having trouble with Kurdish gangs. In Michigan, Sunni Muslims have committed vandalism against Shia Muslim mosques and businesses. Bringing these refugees in great numbers might just bring a lot of trouble to the towns and cities where they settle.

It is perfectly legitimate for a community to ask, “Who are these people who are coming here and what will be their effect on our community?”

Do we want to have to train police, health care personnel and teachers to be alert to possible genital mutilation of little girls? Do we want to deal with possible organized crime and a new network of drug dealers? Do we want to add shoot-outs between families and vandalism between religious sects to our current crime problems?

But because the current fashion of multiculturalism decrees all cultures to be alike, these sorts of questions are not only not asked, but are considered illegitimate. Therefore we must conclude that officials will not tell the truth about potential refugees.

Those who objected to the refugees might not have formulated their objections in this way, and indeed they might not have the same objections that I do. But I wanted here to deal with the most problematic part of the refugee issue because it is so enmeshed with liberals’ greatest fear, that of being called discriminatory.

I wanted to show that discrimination in some instances can be rational, if we are discriminating between groups that will help our community and groups that will hurt and disrupt it.

If we are given all the facts – who is coming, what they are like, what it will cost and who is responsible for every facet of their care – we will be in a better position to be welcoming.

Imagine if you planned a country’s economic future using calculations exclusively based on even numbers. For ideological reasons you excluded odd numbers because you declared that they represent bigotry and have divisive nature since they cannot be divided equally in half. Absolutely all calculations for the future would then end up being wrong. This sounds insane and improbable, but what we’re doing now in the Western world is exactly this naïve. In the name of Multiculturalism we completely ignore all ethnic, religious, cultural and, yes, racial differences, because we have decided that these things don’t matter. But in real life, ethnicity, culture, religion and race do matter. Doesn’t that mean that all our projections for the future by necessity will end up being wrong, since they fail to take important factors into account?

Policy needs to be rooted in a realistic assessment of human nature, not in wishful thinking. Good intentions are far from sufficient to ensure good results. History is full of well-intended policies gone horrible wrong. We know from past experience that basing an ideological world view on a fundamentally flawed understanding of human nature is bound to end in disaster. Society will become more and more totalitarian in order to suppress all the information that doesn’t conform to the official ideology. Isn’t this what is happening in the West now?

I used to believe until quite recently that skin color was irrelevant. I was brought up that way. I still don’t think ethnicity or race does or should mean everything. In fact, I would say it is patently uncivilized to claim that it means everything. But I can no longer say with a straight face that it means absolutely nothing, and if it means more than nothing, its needs to be taken into account. Whether we like this or not is immaterial.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that people tend to prefer their own ethnic group above others. An international poll in 2007 showed that 90 percent of the inhabitants in Egypt, Indonesia and India believed that each country should guard their innate culture and lifestyle. Immigration concerned people in 44 out of the 47 countries.

Guarding your identity is thus a universal human trait, not a white trait. In fact, it is less pronounced among whites today than among anybody else. Only whites cling onto the idea of universalism, everybody else sticks with their own ethnic group. In white majority Western nations it has become a state-sponsored ideology to “celebrate diversity,” despite the fact that all available evidence indicates that more diversity leads to more conflict.

In May 2007, Osama bin Laden’s deputy terrorist leader Ayman al-Zawahri stated that “Al-Qaida is not merely for the benefit of Muslims. That’s why I want blacks in America, people of color, American Indians, Hispanics, and all the weak and oppressed in North and South America, in Africa and Asia, and all over the world.”

Read that statement closely. This Jihadist organization is calling for a global war against whites. Not Christians or Jews. Whites. I have been told all of my life that skin color is irrelevant, but this balancing act gets a lot more difficult when somebody declares war against you because of your race.

According to the columnist Leo McKinstry, the British government has declared war on white English people:

In the name of cultural diversity, Labour attacks anything that smacks of Englishness. The mainstream public are treated with contempt, their rights ignored, their history trashed. In their own land, the English are being turned into second-class citizens.

Keith Best, head of the Immigration Advisory Service, stated that immigrants are “better citizens” than native Britons. Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers’ Alliance pressure group was shocked and replied that “Taxpayers shouldn’t be funding an outfit that describes them as being second-rate citizens.” But apparently, now they do.

DNA studies have proved that a significant majority of those who live in the British Isles today are descended directly from the Ice Age hunters, despite the Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Norman invasions. This accounts for 88% of the Irish, 81% of the Welsh, 70% of the Scots and 68% of the English.

The UK Commission for Racial Equality in 1996 claimed that “everyone who lives in Britain today is either an immigrant or the descendant of an immigrant.” But if everybody is an immigrant, how come people of European stock in the Americas and Australia are still viewed as alien elements by some, even though many of them have lived there for centuries? As Professor David Conway demonstrates in his book A Nation Of Immigrants?, after the invasion led by William the Conqueror in 1066, the total number of Norman settlers in Britain was never more than five per cent of the population. The inflow now is 25 times any previous level and frequently from totally alien cultures, not from neighboring territories and cultural cousins as previously.

I’m sure the English are told that this is a result of colonialism, but there are no Britons left in Pakistan, so why should there be Pakistanis in Britain? The Germans had a colony in Namibia. Why should they accept millions of Turks, who have a thousand years of extremely brutal colonial history of their own, because of this? There are not many Dutch people left in Indonesia, so why should the Dutch be rendered a minority in their major cities by Moroccans and others? And why should European countries such as Portugal, Spain and Greece, which have all suffered from centuries of Islamic colonization, have to accept Muslims into their lands? Switzerland, Sweden, Finland and Norway hardly have any colonial history at all, yet are still subject to mass immigration. The truth is that immigration policies bear little correlation to past colonialist history, population density or size. Ireland, Denmark, Britain, France, Sweden, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands have one, and only one, thing in common: The natives are white, and thereby have no legitimate claim to their own countries.

As Professor Ida Magli writes in an Italian essay entitled A Nation for Sale: “Why can’t we protest? Why aren’t we allowed what every people has always had the right to say, that is that no ruler, whatever the system of government — monarchy, dictatorship, democracy — has either the power or the right to sell off the homeland of their own subjects?”

The columnist Kevin Myers in Ireland thinks that no country has ever accepted, never mind assimilated, the volumes of immigrants now present in his country:– – – – – – – – –

Why the presumption that an Asian Muslim who lives in Ireland is in any way Irish? My mother lived most of her life in England, but never for a second thought of herself as English. The media should be asking the big question, ‘Why are we still admitting hundreds of thousands of immigrants?’ Instead, we are obsessing with the relatively trivial question of: Are the Irish people, who after all have admitted vast armies of strangers to their national home, racist? This is self-hatred at its most pathetic, and its most self-defeating.

Rune Gerhardsen of the Labor Party in Oslo, the son of Norway’s longest-serving Prime Minister in history, states that “When I went to school we were taught about the Great Migrations. Today’s migrations are just as big. This is part of an international trend we neither can nor want to stop. I think this development is first and foremost exciting and positive.” He likes to say that we have lived for 10,000 years without anybody visiting us. Now we’ve had a massive change within an extremely brief historical period of time.

I will give Gerhardsen credit for frankly admitting that this is by far the greatest demographic change in our nation’s history since the end of the last Ice Age. The problem is, this change, which has already made the country a lot less safe than it was only a generation ago, has been conducted without real debate, solely with propaganda and censorship. And I’m not so sure all of these groups have come merely to “visit” us. Some of them are here to colonize and subdue us, and readily admit this if you care to listen to them.

According to the writer Kent Andersen, the greatest social experiment the population has ever been subject to was never decided democratically. The native majority were never allowed to have a say about whether they wanted to change the country forever. In his view, you don’t get mass immigration for decades unless somebody with power allows this and desires it.

During the Multicultural craze of the 1990s, novelist Torgrim Eggen in an essay entitled “The psychotic racism” warned against “race wars in the streets” as a result of mass immigration. The solution to this was not to limit immigration, but to limit criticism of immigration. According to Eggen, xenophobia and opposition to mass immigration should be viewed as a mental illness, and hence “the solution to this xenophobia is that you should distribute medication to those who are seriously affected. I have discussed this with professor of community medicine, Dr. Per Fugelli, and he liked the idea.” Mr Fugelli suggested putting anti psychotic drugs in the city’s drinking water.

This may sound too extreme to be meant seriously, but Mr. Fugelli has continued to publicly chastise those who are critical of national immigration policies. Eggen warned that arguments about how ordinary people are concerned over mass immigration shouldn’t be accepted because this could lead to Fascism: “One should be on one’s guard against people, especially politicians, who invoke xenophobia on behalf of others. And if certain people start their reasoning with phrases such as ‘ordinary people feel that,’ one shouldn’t argue at all, one should hit [them].”

Repeated violence committed by non-white immigrants against whites is dismissed because they come from “weak groups.” But whites are a weak group. We are a rapidly shrinking global minority, and Nordic-looking Scandinavians are a minority of a minority. Ethnologist Maria Bäckman in her study “Whiteness and gender” followed a group of Swedish girls in the immigrant-dominated suburb of Rinkeby outside Stockholm. Several of the native girls stated that they had dyed their hair to avoid harassment and being called “whore.” We thus already now have a situation where being blond in certain areas of Sweden, not just in Pakistan or Egypt, makes you a target of harassment and aggression.

In my country, the Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud from 2006 made Multiculturalism and total non-discrimination into an official state ideology. If a Muslim immigrant claims that a native has somehow discriminated against him, the native non-Muslim has to mount proof of his own innocence. I have later discovered that similar laws have been passed across much of Western Europe, encouraged by the European Union.

Native Europeans are being told that we don’t have a history and a culture, and that we thus “gain” a culture when others move to our countries. This is an insult to thousands of years of European history, to the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and cultures and the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian heritage all Westerners share in. The funny part is, the next second we are told that we do have a culture, but it consists of nothing but a long line of crimes and is thus nothing to preserve, anyway.

My nation doesn’t even have a colonial history. It gained its independence as late as the twentieth century, at which point it was a poor country, yet because I am white, I am to be held personally responsible for every bad act, perceived or real, committed by every person who happens to have roughly similar skin color throughout history. American novelist Susan Sontag even stated that “The white race is the cancer of human history.” I am told that I am evil specifically because of my race, and five minutes later I’m told that race doesn’t matter.

I do not hold Abdullah who sells kebab down on the corner personally responsible for sacking Constantinople, abducting millions of Europeans to slavery, colonizing the Iberian Peninsula, ruining the Balkans or threatening Vienna several times. I criticize Islam because Muslims have never admitted their past and will continue to commit atrocities as long as the institution of Jihad is alive. I do not believe in collective responsibility, and I do not think a person should be held responsible for actions made by his ancestors centuries ago.

On the other hand, if I am to take the blame, personally, for every bad act, perceived or real, committed by any white person in the past, it is only fair that I, personally, should also take credit for their achievements. It was peoples of European stock who created the modern world, not anybody else. If I am to be held personally responsible for colonialism, I want personal credit for being a part of the one civilization that has taken the greatest strides for mankind of any civilization that has ever existed on this planet. I’m done with apologizing for my existence for the nameless crime of being born white.

After decades of inundation about the evils of ‘white racism’ coming from all directions, and most especially from the media and education establishments, the average white is programmed to avoid anything that smacks of conscious endorsement of his own race. In the current social climate, to display favorable regard towards that which is white, not only is forbidden, but is viewed as an automatic disparagement of non-whites. A ‘White Pride’ T-shirt is deemed a threatening symbol, whereas a ‘Black Supremacy’ slogan on a button or garment is viewed as an understandable, albeit angry response to undeserved past abuses. Any public effort to promote a white theme is doomed to failure, even if the proper bows to racial diversity are adhered to. Whites learn early to censor themselves.

I’ve been told by Americans that they have moved beyond race, but judging from examples such as this, it looks more as if they have established a culture of institutionalized white masochism. It’s not that Americans have moved beyond race, it’s just that the whites have unilaterally surrendered. The United States was almost 90% white as late as 1965, and will be minority white within a couple of generations. I don’t know of any example where the formerly dominant group has become a minority and this has not resulted in a complete change of the nature of that country, or to its dissolution, but in the USA, this entire subject is taboo because it is “racist.” That’s not rational.

I have listened to claims regarding the supposed benefits of mass immigration, why it is inevitable and why those who resist are bad people. The propaganda is remarkably similar from the Netherlands via Britain to Sweden and Italy, and that’s not a coincidence. This is all happening as a coordinated and well-planned assault on established national cultures, organized by the European Union and supported by the national political and media elites.

It has happened many times that a people move into an area and subdue those living there, but the natives have at least been allowed to defend themselves. It is unprecedented in the annals of history that a people is banned by their own leaders from defending their lands from foreign colonization and are even expected to fund this colonization. It is one of the greatest crimes of our age that the indigenous people of an entire continent, at least the Western half of it, are systematically deprived of their heritage, their history, their land and ultimately perhaps their entire physical existence, all with the active aid of the very individuals who are supposed to protect their interests. The only reason why this is considered positive, or even remotely acceptable, is because the natives in this case are white. There is no other reason for this.

In Glasgow, Scotland, Kriss Donald, a 15-year-old totally innocent white schoolboy was abducted, stabbed repeatedly and then doused in petrol and burned to death by a group of Pakistani immigrants. Labour politician Mohammad Sarwar, who helped in bringing some of the men to justice, later became the first elected representative in Britain to step down due to threats against his family.

The established historical pattern is that people who are conquered by others are harassed by the newcomers. I don’t see any reason to expect this to be different just because the natives happen to be white. On the contrary. We will be attacked even more viciously because we are a formerly dominant group. When we are told that mass immigration is “inevitable,” we are actually being told that verbal and physical abuse of out children is inevitable and that we should “get used to it.” I see no reason to accept that. If mass immigration leads to harassment of my children, it is my duty to resist it.

Jews were once told to “get back to Palestine.” When they did, they were told to “get out of Palestine.” The people who said this didn’t object to where Jews lived, they objected to the fact that they existed at all. I sometimes wonder whether whites of European descent, a global minority, are the Jews of the 21st century. I also notice that while people of European descent are told to “get back to Europe” in North America or Australia, whites in Europe are demonized if they resist being turned into a minority in their own countries. The problem then, apparently, isn’t where whites live, it’s that we exist at all.

Observer Ole Kulterstad notes that Europeans who are against free migration are labeled as “right-wing extremists.” But common sense indicates that giving away your country to alien cultures is more extreme than merely wanting to preserve it as it once was. I agree with him. I’m sick of hearing how Islamic organizations that want to destroy my civilization are called “moderates,” whereas Westerners are extremists if we resist, yet that is exactly what our media and our authorities do. We are not extremists; we are subject to policies that are extreme. Is gradually reducing a people to a minority in their own land, without proper debate about future consequences, not to be regarded as extreme?

I hear some writers fear an extremist backlash in Europe, but if people are so concerned about white extremism then they should cease creating the foundations for such extremism to grow. Native Europeans increasingly get the feeling that they are pushed into a corner and have an entirely justifiable fear of being overwhelmed. Fear leads to desperation, and desperation sometimes leads to aggression. If we do get an outbreak of political movements in Europe that really are extremist — and I sometimes fear this outcome, too — this will not come about because white Europeans are born evil, it will come about because white Europeans will be pushed into extremism, feel that their continued existence is at stake and that they have been abandoned by their own authorities. The solution to this is simply to recognize that Western nations have accepted more immigration from alien cultures in a shorter period of time than any other civilization has done peacefully in history. We have reached our limits and we need a break from mass immigration before our entire political and economic system breaks down.

The idea that every white person who desires self-determination and self-preservation is a racist, a white supremacist and a Nazi is nonsense and should flatly be rejected. The vast majority of racist violence in Western nations is by non-whites attacking whites. Consequently, if we limit immigration this is anti-racism, since we are protecting our children against racist violence. It is not about white supremacy, either, it is about equality. Whites are currently the only racial group specifically denied the opportunity to defend their countries and heritage. If we assert our right to do so we are thus fighting for equality, not supremacy.

The “Nazi” accusations so carelessly thrown out these days are completely baseless in this context. The Nazis believed that whites, and blondes in particular, had the right to colonize or eradicate others. But the policy we follow today could be dubbed reversed Nazism since it is based on the assumption that whites should have fewer rights than others and can be colonized or culturally eradicated with impunity. I don’t see why I should either be a “Nazi” or embrace and celebrate my extinction. It’s a false choice.

I suspect future historians will call this era the Age of White Masochism. The white man conquered the world and then suffered a nervous breakdown, a kind of collective neurosis shared by an entire civilization. However, I sense that this era is slowly coming to an end.

I would use two arguments as to why the current mass immigration the West should be halted:

1.

Whites, too, have a right to exist. The primary duty you have as a human being is to preserve the heritage of your ancestors and pass on to your children a country they can call their own and where they can live in dignity.

2.

The ongoing immigration is population dumping where less successful cultures dump their population in more successful ones. This is a form of global Communism and will generate the same effects by destroying successful communities and centers of excellence.

I believe whites in the 21st century should desire a room of our own where we can prosper, live in a major Western city without having to fear violence because of our race, and without being stripped of our heritage in order to placate people who moved to our countries out of their own free will. We have the right to preserve our heritage and are under no obligation to commit collective suicide or serve as a dumping ground for other countries. It has nothing to do with animosity towards others. For my part, I am being entirely honest if I say that I still love visiting other cultures, but I will love this even more if I know I can also return to my own.

Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter in the last years of the Cold War, posed an interesting question the other day. He noted that on Feb. 22, 1946, a mere six months after the end of World War II, George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat in Moscow, sent his famous 5,000-word telegram that laid out the stakes of the Cold War and the nature of the enemy, and that that “Long Telegram” in essence shaped the way America thought about the conflict all the way up to the fall of the Berlin Wall four decades later. And what Mr. Robinson wondered was this:

“Here we are today, more than six years after 9/11. Does anyone believe a new ‘Long Telegram’ has yet been written? And accepted throughout the senior levels of the government?”

Answer: No.

Because, if it had, you’d hear it echoed in public – just as the Long Telegram provided the underpinning of the Truman Doctrine a year later. Kennan himself had differences with Truman and successive presidents over what he regarded as their misinterpretation, but, granted all that, most of what turned up over the next 40 years – the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam war, Soviet subversion in Africa and Europe, Grenada and Afghanistan – is consistent with the conflict as laid out by one relatively minor State Department functionary decades earlier.

Why can’t we do that today?

Well, one reason is we’re not really comfortable with ideology, either ours or anybody else’s. Insofar as we have an ideology it’s a belief in the virtues of “multiculturalism,” “tolerance,” “celebrate diversity” – a bumper-sticker ideology that is, in effect, an anti-ideology which explicitly rejects the very idea of drawing distinctions between your beliefs and anybody else’s.

Less sentimental chaps may (at least privately) regard the above as bunk, and prefer to place their faith in economics and technology. In Britain in the 1960s, the political class declared that the country “needed” mass immigration. When the less-enlightened lower orders in northern England fretted that they would lose their towns to the “Pakis”, they were dismissed as paranoid racists. The experts were right in a narrow, economic sense: The immigrants became mill workers and bus drivers. But the paranoid racists were right, too: The mills closed anyway, and mosques sprouted in their place; and Oldham and Dewesbury adopted the arranged cousin-marriage traditions of Mirpur in Pakistan; and Yorkshire can now boast among its native sons the July 7th London Tube bombers. The experts thought economics trumped all; the knuckle-dragging masses had a more basic unease, convinced that it’s culture that’s determinative.

To take another example, on CNN the other night Anderson Cooper was worrying about the homicide rate in Philadelphia. The City of Brotherly Love is the murder capital of the nation, and CNN had dispatched a reporter to interview the grieving mother of a young black boy killed while riding his bicycle in the street. Apparently, a couple of cars had got backed up behind him, and an impatient passenger in one of them pulled out a gun and shot the kid. Anderson Cooper then went to commercials and, when he returned, introduced a report on how easy it is to buy guns in Philadelphia and how local politicians are reluctant to do anything about it. This is, again, an argument only the expert class could make. In the 1990s, the number of guns in America went up by 40 million, but the murder rate fell dramatically. If firearms availability were the determining factor, Vermont and Switzerland would have high murder rates. Yet in Montpelier or Geneva the solution to a boy carelessly bicycling in front of you down a city street when you’re in a hurry is not to grab your gun and blow him away. It’s the culture, not the technology.

Very few members of the transnational jet set want to hear this. They’re convinced that economic and technological factors shape the world all but exclusively, and that the sexy buzz words – “globalization”, “networking” – cure all ills. You may recall the famous Golden Arches thesis promulgated by The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman – that countries with McDonald’s franchises don’t go to war with each other. Tell it to the Serbs. When the Iron Curtain fell, Yugoslavia was, economically, the best-positioned of the recovering Communist states. But, given the choice between expanding the already booming vacation resorts of the Dalmatian coast for their eager Anglo-German tourist clientele or reducing Croatia and Bosnia and Kosovo to rubble over ethno-linguistic differences no outsider can even discern (“Serbo-Croat”?), Yugoslavia opted for the latter.

As I wrote in my book, the most successful example of globalization is not Starbucks or McDonald’s but Wahhabism, an obscure backwater variant of Islam practiced by a few Bedouin deadbeats that Saudi oil wealth has now exported to every corner of the Earth – to Waziristan, Indonesia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Toronto, Portland, Dearborn and Falls Church. You can live on the other side of the planet and, when Starbucks opens up in town, you might acquire a taste for a decaf latte, but that’s it. Otherwise, life goes on. By contrast, when the Saudi-funded preachers hung out their shingles on every Main Street in the West, they radicalized a significant chunk of young European Muslims. They transformed not just their beverage habits, but the way they look at the societies in which they live.

So many of the administration’s present problems derive from squeamishness about ideological confrontation that any effective Long Telegram would have to address. When President Bush declared a “war on terror,” cynics understood that he had no particular interest in the IRA or the Tamil Tigers, but that he was constrained from identifying the real enemy in any meaningful sense: In the fall of 2001, a war on Islamic this or Islamic that would have caused too many problems with Gen. Musharraf and the House of Saud and other chaps he wanted to keep on side. But it’s one reason, for example, why the Democrats, as soon as it suited them, had no difficulty detaching the Iraq front from the broader war. If it’s a “war on terror” against terrorist organizations, well, Saddam is a head of state and Iraq is a sovereign nation: the 1946 Long Telegram was long enough to embrace events in Ethiopia and Grenada 30 years later, but the “war on terror” template doesn’t comfortably extend to Iraq. Nor to the remorseless Wahhabist subversion of Europe. Nor to the Palestinian Authority, where Condi Rice is currently presiding over the latest reprise of the usual “peace process” clichés designed to persuade Israel to make concessions to a populace, which largely believes everything the al-Qaida guys do. The state-funded (which means European- and U.S.-taxpayer funded) Palestinian newspaper published a cartoon this September celebrating 9/11 as a great victory.

Perhaps we need more investment in jobs. Or maybe guns are too easily available in Gaza. Or, if guns aren’t, self-detonating school kids certainly are. This is the ultimate asymmetric warfare: we’re trying to beat back ideology with complacent Western assumptions. Not a good bet.

The police go to a pub in a small town in Devon, looking for a suspect. They see a man there who they think resembles the suspect, and approach him. He becomes abusive and they arrest him and take him down to the station. He is drunk.

After a couple of hours in a jail cell, he says he feels sick and demands a doctor. The police call the police surgeon. When he arrives (he is an Indian), the arrested man says, “I want an English doctor, not a fucking Paki.”

The police then charge the man with racially aggravated insulting behavior. He elects for a superior court trial, and the prosecution proceeds with the case as though it were a very serious one.

The judge decides that the court should not waste its time on so trivial a matter, especially when burglars and robbers frequently escape charges. The doctor, he says, is a man of some social standing; a single insult from a drunk could not, or should not, have harmed him unduly. He then gives a bit of advice to the accused: “Next time, call him a fat bastard and don’t say anything about his color.”

The judge soon had to explain publicly, in an almost groveling way, that he by no means underestimated the seriousness of racial insult, and that he was not making light of it.

Contained in this story, of course, are many elements of modern social and moral pathology. The judge, surely, was being ironic at the expense of those who thought that a single boorish remark by a man who, after all, had been wrongly identified by the police so threatened the social fabric that it deserved the attention of many highly educated people and a cost to the public of many thousands of dollars. But even mild criticism of the prevailing pieties is becoming intolerable in Britain.

In the very same week, the British Medical Journal published a debate on whether British Muslims should have their own, separate medical services—funded by the state, naturally. Now there’s irony for you.

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6. See link above

7. Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism, by Jerry Z. Muller

Summary: Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But in fact, it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, it is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.

Note: This article is too long to copy in its entirely. It is well worth reading the whole thing. Here are some excerpts:

Projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world, Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. After all, in the United States people of varying ethnic origins live cheek by jowl in relative peace. Within two or three generations of immigration, their ethnic identities are attenuated by cultural assimilation and intermarriage. Surely, things cannot be so different elsewhere.

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Americans also find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture, often deliberately constructed. And ethicists scorn value systems based on narrow group identities rather than cosmopolitanism.

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But none of this will make ethnonationalism go away. Immigrants to the United States usually arrive with a willingness to fit into their new country and reshape their identities accordingly. But for those who remain behind in lands where their ancestors have lived for generations, if not centuries, political identities often take ethnic form, producing competing communal claims to political power. The creation of a peaceful regional order of nation-states has usually been the product of a violent process of ethnic separation. In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.

———-Snip———-

Europe’s frontiers are not so open. And a survey would show that whereas in 1900 there were many states in Europe without a single overwhelmingly dominant nationality, by 2007 there were only two, and one of those, Belgium, was close to breaking up. Aside from Switzerland, in other words — where the domestic ethnic balance of power is protected by strict citizenship laws — in Europe the “separatist project” has not so much vanished as triumphed.

Far from having been superannuated in 1945, in many respects ethnonationalism was at its apogee in the years immediately after World War II. European stability during the Cold War era was in fact due partly to the widespread fulfillment of the ethnonationalist project. And since the end of the Cold War, ethnonationalism has continued to reshape European borders.

In short, ethnonationalism has played a more profound and lasting role in modern history than is commonly understood, and the processes that led to the dominance of the ethnonational state and the separation of ethnic groups in Europe are likely to reoccur elsewhere. Increased urbanization, literacy, and political mobilization; differences in the fertility rates and economic performance of various ethnic groups; and immigration will challenge the internal structure of states as well as their borders. Whether politically correct or not, ethnonationalism will continue to shape the world in the twenty-first century.

THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY

There are two major ways of thinking about national identity. One is that all people who live within a country’s borders are part of the nation, regardless of their ethnic, racial, or religious origins. This liberal or civic nationalism is the conception with which contemporary Americans are most likely to identify. But the liberal view has competed with and often lost out to a different view, that of ethnonationalism. The core of the ethnonationalist idea is that nations are defined by a shared heritage, which usually includes a common language, a common faith, and a common ethnic ancestry.

The ethnonationalist view has traditionally dominated through much of Europe and has held its own even in the United States until recently. For substantial stretches of U.S. history, it was believed that only the people of English origin, or those who were Protestant, or white, or hailed from northern Europe were real Americans. It was only in 1965 that the reform of U.S. immigration law abolished the system of national-origin quotas that had been in place for several decades. This system had excluded Asians entirely and radically restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe.

Ethnonationalism draws much of its emotive power from the notion that the members of a nation are part of an extended family, ultimately united by ties of blood. It is the subjective belief in the reality of a common “we” that counts. The markers that distinguish the in-group vary from case to case and time to time, and the subjective nature of the communal boundaries has led some to discount their practical significance. But as Walker Connor, an astute student of nationalism, has noted, “It is not what is, but what people believe is that has behavioral consequences.” And the central tenets of ethnonationalist belief are that nations exist, that each nation ought to have its own state, and that each state should be made up of the members of a single nation.

———–Snip————-

POSTWAR BUT NOT POSTNATIONAL

One might have expected that the Nazi regime’s deadly policies and crushing defeat would mark the end of the ethnonationalist era. But in fact they set the stage for another massive round of ethnonational transformation. The political settlement in central Europe after World War I had been achieved primarily by moving borders to align them with populations. After World War II, it was the populations that moved instead. Millions of people were expelled from their homes and countries, with at least the tacit support of the victorious Allies.

——–Snip———-

DECOLONIZATION AND AFTER

The effects of ethnonationalism, of course, have hardly been confined to Europe. For much of the developing world, decolonization has meant ethnic disaggregation through the exchange or expulsion of local minorities.

———-Snip———–

THE BALANCE SHEET

Analysts of ethnic disaggregation typically focus on its destructive effects, which is understandable given the direct human suffering it has often entailed. But such attitudes can yield a distorted perspective by overlooking the less obvious costs and also the important benefits that ethnic separation has brought.

Economists from Adam Smith onward, for example, have argued that the efficiencies of competitive markets tend to increase with the markets’ size….

Ethnic disaggregation also seems to have deleterious effects on cultural vitality. Precisely because most of their citizens share a common cultural and linguistic heritage, the homogenized states of postwar Europe have tended to be more culturally insular than their demographically diverse predecessors. With few Jews in Europe and few Germans in Prague, that is, there are fewer Franz Kafkas….

But if ethnonationalism has frequently led to tension and conflict, it has also proved to be a source of cohesion and stability. When French textbooks began with “Our ancestors the Gauls” or when Churchill spoke to wartime audiences of “this island race,” they appealed to ethnonationalist sensibilities as a source of mutual trust and sacrifice. Liberal democracy and ethnic homogeneity are not only compatible; they can be complementary.

One could argue that Europe has been so harmonious since World War II not because of the failure of ethnic nationalism but because of its success, which removed some of the greatest sources of conflict both within and between countries. The fact that ethnic and state boundaries now largely coincide has meant that there are fewer disputes over borders or expatriate communities, leading to the most stable territorial configuration in European history.

These ethnically homogeneous polities have displayed a great deal of internal solidarity, moreover, facilitating government programs, including domestic transfer payments, of various kinds. When the Swedish Social Democrats were developing plans for Europe’s most extensive welfare state during the interwar period, the political scientist Sheri Berman has noted, they conceived of and sold them as the construction of a folkhemmet, or “people’s home.”

———-Snip————-

NEW ETHNIC MIXING

Along with the process of forced ethnic disaggregation over the last two centuries, there has also been a process of ethnic mixing brought about by voluntary emigration. The general pattern has been one of emigration from poor, stagnant areas to richer and more dynamic ones.

——–Snip————

The most dramatic transformation of European ethnic balances in recent decades has come from the immigration of people of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern origin, and here the results have been mixed. Some of these groups have achieved remarkable success, such as the Indian Hindus who have come to the United Kingdom. But in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, on balance the educational and economic progress of Muslim immigrants has been more limited and their cultural alienation greater.

How much of the problem can be traced to discrimination, how much to the cultural patterns of the immigrants themselves, and how much to the policies of European governments is difficult to determine. But a number of factors, from official multiculturalism to generous welfare states to the ease of contact with ethnic homelands, seem to have made it possible to create ethnic islands where assimilation into the larger culture and economy is limited.

As a result, some of the traditional contours of European politics have been upended. The left, for example, has tended to embrace immigration in the name of egalitarianism and multiculturalism. But if there is indeed a link between ethnic homogeneity and a population’s willingness to support generous income-redistribution programs, the encouragement of a more heterogeneous society may end up undermining the left’s broader political agenda. And some of Europe’s libertarian cultural propensities have already clashed with the cultural illiberalism of some of the new immigrant communities.

Should Muslim immigrants not assimilate and instead develop a strong communal identification along religious lines, one consequence might be a resurgence of traditional ethnonational identities in some states — or the development of a new European identity defined partly in contradistinction to Islam (with the widespread resistance to the extension of full EU membership to Turkey being a possible harbinger of such a shift).

———-Snip————

once ethnic antagonism has crossed a certain threshold of violence, maintaining the rival groups within a single polity becomes far more difficult.

This unfortunate reality creates dilemmas for advocates of humanitarian intervention in such conflicts, because making and keeping peace between groups that have come to hate and fear one another is likely to require costly ongoing military missions rather than relatively cheap temporary ones. When communal violence escalates to ethnic cleansing, moreover, the return of large numbers of refugees to their place of origin after a cease-fire has been reached is often impractical and even undesirable, for it merely sets the stage for a further round of conflict down the road.

Partition may thus be the most humane lasting solution to such intense communal conflicts. It inevitably creates new flows of refugees, but at least it deals with the problem at issue. The challenge for the international community in such cases is to separate communities in the most humane manner possible: by aiding in transport, assuring citizenship rights in the new homeland, and providing financial aid for resettlement and economic absorption. The bill for all of this will be huge, but it will rarely be greater than the material costs of interjecting and maintaining a foreign military presence large enough to pacify the rival ethnic combatants or the moral cost of doing nothing.

NOTE: This is long, but doesn’t do justice to Muller’s sustained argument. It is a very important article because it is by an academic, not a politician or pundit, and what he concludes is completely opposite to most of the thinking about ethnic groups today. Historical forces have caused more ethnic strife than ever before, and in many situations the only humane solution is to separate the groups geographically.

Motivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia.

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, KhoÂ­meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

10 Responses to “Diversity”

Vadersaid

Judith K. Warner and other writers: It is so true! Refugees have been bringing danger to our communities for so many decades, even centuries! The Italians brought the Mafia, the Irish brought Protestant violence and cultural solidarity, the Jews brought banking and “Zionism,” and Germans brought Nazi sentiments. Not all, but some of these people have been extremely dangerous to national security. Oh yes, and the British, French, and Spanish brought small pocks, Catholic bloodshed, and genocide to the west. Damn those immigrants and so-called “refugees!” Who do they think they are!?

Blanche Schwarzmannsaid

Out of curiosity, since when has diversity been an element in refugee cases?

Last I checked, asylum was granted to refugees because they either faced past persecution or have a legitimate fear of future persecution in their home country. I have never seen a single asylum case that considered diversity in deciding whether to grant asylum.

Protection, not diversity, is the reason the US maintains a system of granting asylum to refugees. The US is a signatory to the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention (http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49da0e466.html), a legal document prompted by the lack of international protection for Jews during the Holocaust. The US is obligated by international law–not any supposed interest in diversity–to protect refugees. And courts are very good at following this–they focus on persecution and protection in deciding refugees’ asylum claims, not diversity.

A French philosopher once said that society arranges things in such a way that it has the appearance of justice.

In today’s society, even when we have humanist leaders to help the siffering people, but some race conscious people who otherwise are the great prechers of human rights for their own group, when feel slightely threatened wouldn’t even stop to propagate their hidden xenophobic agenda. They wouldn’t dare to use race to ignore human suffering of the innocents and even wouldn’t hesitate to oppose resettlement of people escaping war and destructin.

Base mansaid

Its really interesting how short and selective memory is.
Having themselves only not too long ago moved to a place that was not theirs; having brought with them a disruptive, destructive culture; having used extreme violence to forcefully evict the orignal land owners off their ancestral homes; having brought incomprehensible behaviour, language and culture with them … they now turn around and claim that new comers are threatening to destroy THEIR country.